br>by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
After Who Kidnapped My Mom? Charles and I watched a DVD that surprised me when I recently ran into it in the backlog: a 1970 concert video by the Boston Symphony under their assistant conductor at the time, Michael Tilson Thomas. The DVD consists of performances of three rather forbidding pieces in late 19th and early 20th century repertoire: Charles Ives’ Three Places in New England (composed between 1908 and 1914 and revised in 1929), Jean Sibelius’ Symphony No. 4 (composed in 1910 and 1911), and the Dawn and Siegfried’s Rhine Journey instrumental sequence from Richard Wagner’s opera Götterdämmerung (composed between 1871 and 1874 and first performed in Bayreuth in 1876 as part of the complete cycle The Ring of the Nibelung). There were also two bonus tracks consisting of interviews with Michael Tilson Thomas, one from 1970 and quite obviously filmed as part of the original telecast, in which he discusses the Sibelius Symphony No. 4 and praises the work’s economy, noting that the entire symphonic structure is built on the first four notes (“Just like Beethoven’s Fifth!” I couldn’t help but think), and one from 2013 in London in which he recalls just how he got the job as assistant conductor of the Boston Symphony while he was still in his 20’s.
Even before that Tilson Thomas had been quite extraordinarily lucky in getting himself into situations where older musicians mentored him – including Igor Stravinsky, Friedelind Wagner (Richard Wagner’s granddaughter), legendary pianist Artur Rubinstein, violin star Jascha Heifetz and cello soloist Gregor Piatigorsky. He also mentions having come from a theatrical background; his grandfather was Boris Thomashevsky, founder of the Yiddish Art Theatre in New York in the 1880’s. Tilson Thomas recalled being hired in the late 1960’s to work at Bayreuth under Friedelind Wagner to serve as rehearsal pianist for quite a lot of complicated contemporary German music, and at one point he went to a rehearsal of Hans Werner Henze’s opera The Bassarids but left after five minutes on the ground that he was already playing difficult German music on his job and he shouldn’t have to listen to it on his day off as well. By chance another person also walked out of the Henze rehearsal and turned out to be a composer who’d just placed a work with the Boston Symphony, who were looking for an assistant to their newly hired conductor, William Steinberg. Tilson Thomas not only worked under Steinberg for a year or so but got quite a few concerts of his own, especially in the field of contemporary music since he’d already established “cred” with modern composers like Pierre Boulez, Lukas Foss and John Cage. He also got to record with the Boston Symphony for Deutsche Grammophon, including a spectacular recording of Ives’ Three Places in New England backed with a work I was even more interested in, Sun-Treader by Ives’ friend, the notoriously cranky and self-critical Carl Ruggles. (In 1979, as music director of the Buffalo Philharmonic, Tilson Thomas recorded a two-LP set of all the then-extant music of Ruggles, including a remake of Sun-Treader; the set was later reissued on CD in 2012, and New World Records unearthed some previously unknown Ruggies pieces in 2005 for a CD called The Uncovered Ruggles.)
Tilson Thomas’s interview also featured his reminiscences of certain Boston Symphony players as individuals – including a quirky clarinetist who had previously worked with Arturo Toscanini and the NBC Symphony, who had a penchant for adding or subtracting notes from his part and leaving the rest of the reed section to scramble to keep up with him. The interviews were, if anything, more interesting than the music; I was familiar with Tilson Thomas’s magisterial reading of the Ives because I’d grown up with it since the 1970’s, but both it and the Sibelius got a bit too craggy after a while and I longed for the breaking dawn and bright sunshine of the Wagner. It’s a pity Tilson Thomas didn’t conduct more opera (he’s still alive but because of ill health has stepped back from most conducting gigs), because his Wagner is fully alive to the power of the music. I noticed he took the grandiose, upbeat concert ending Engelbert Humperdinck (Wagner’s assistant at Bayreuth and the composer of Hansel und Gretel, not the British singer who appropriated his name in the 1960’s) added to the Rhine Journey. Purists object to this, but the ending Wagner wrote isn’t really an ending at all; it’s a transition to the darker music and drama of the scene with the Gibichungs that marks the first act of Götterdäuuerung, and it works superbly in context but it really doesn’t work when the piece is performed as a stand-alone concert work. In 1970 Michael Tilson Thomas was still a quite cute young man with a resemblance to the young Dustin Hoiffman, and it was fun to watch him already making great music at the outset of a career that, at least within the realm of classical music, would make him a superstar.
